Criss Cross

Chapter 105

Both our phones started buzzing and ringing at four thirty a.m.

I took a look at the text from Mahoney and cursed. “That’s impossible!”

“Goddamn it!” Bree yelled.

We dressed in seconds and pounded down the stairs.

“What’s happening?” Nana Mama cried after us.

“Go back to bed.”

“You’ve barely been to bed!”

We didn’t answer, just ran out to the car. I threw a bubble on the roof and we took off, me driving, Bree on her radio, barking orders. Sirens wailed all around us as we sped through the deserted city. Six minutes later, we pulled up in front of George Washington University Hospital.

“Go out ten blocks with the perimeter,” Bree said into her radio. “No one in or out. All vehicles searched.”

Sampson was already in the hall outside the ICU. “He’s armed and dressed as a uniformed Metro police officer.”

“What?” I said as Bree broadcast the news. “How?”

“Take a look.”

We walked to the open door of the room where M had been. Ivan Marky, the same young officer who’d been on guard when we left the evening before, was in the bed. He was naked. His throat had been cut.

Sampson said, “M put his clothes on, went to the nurses’ station, put the officer’s gun in the faces of the two on duty, and ordered them to give him all the narcotics and antibiotics they had. Then he took their cell phones, locked them in a closet, and left.”

“How long ago?”

“Forty minutes.”

“Forty minutes,” Bree cried. “Are you kidding me?”

I closed my eyes, seeing M in the moments after Sampson shot him, remembering how he’d shown fear and said he couldn’t feel a thing. And the surgeon had said his spine was cracked and bruised, hadn’t he?

“I don’t understand how he’s standing, much less walking,” I said. “And if he had help, he’s way beyond that ten-block perimeter. He could be long gone out of the city.”

Bree said, “He can’t last in his condition.”

“He got up in that condition, yanked his IVs out in that condition, and killed a cop in that condition!”

“We’ll catch him, Alex.”

“What if he gets to Ali before we do?”

“Alex, we can’t think that—”

“What other way is there to think, Bree? He obviously moved Ali out of the anthill before he came to our home. He’s obviously heading to wherever he has our son stashed now. God only knows what he’ll do,” I said. I paused and then shook my head in disgust. “ ‘Listen to your heart, Mr. Psycho Killer.’ Could I have been more of an idiot?”

“You tried to reach him the only way you thought possible. It was brilliant.”

“And he brilliantly used it against us.”

“Go home. Get some rest. You’ll think straighter.”

“You’ve had less sleep than me.”

“But for some reason I’m more clearheaded. I feel in my heart that he’s coming home. So sleep a few hours, then call me. You’re no help to me or Ali like this.”

I didn’t reply, didn’t say a thing to Sampson, just turned and left. On the elevator, on the cab ride home, and going back into the house, my emotions swayed from enraged to demoralized to defeated.

I had tried to stir some reconnection to humanity in M. That failed miserably.

I tried to think about the other things he’d said to me in his hospital room. Had he really been in foster care? Did he really beat a man to death with a chain for raping and murdering his sister? Or was that all made up on the fly?

Our kitchen clock said five minutes past six when I went in and flipped on the light. I hadn’t slept enough in weeks, and yet I felt wired, unable to even contemplate going to bed. If I went up there now, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get Ali out of my mind.

What was he going through? Was he suffering? I closed my eyes, terrified by the thought that, with M on the loose, I might end up finding my son strangled with a silk tie or missing his head.

I looked at the coffeemaker and then past it to the cabinet where we keep the liquor. I couldn’t stomach the thought of whiskey, but I knew booze could take me where I wanted to go, to the darkness, to no past, no future, no now, no—

The front doorbell rang.

At ten after six in the morning?

The bell rang again, and I hustled into the hall, not wanting to wake Nana or Jannie if I could help it and feeling dizzy and disoriented, as if I were about to be hit with a migraine on top of exhaustion.

I opened the door. Dwight Rivers stood there, leaning on his crutches and breathing hard.

“Mr. Rivers?” I said.

“I drove straight here, Dr. Cross,” he said. “I thought you should be the first to see this.”

“What is it?” I asked as he started down the stairs.

Rivers didn’t answer. He reached the sidewalk and crutched his way to a pickup with a camper on the back. He opened the camper’s rear door and motioned with his chin for me to look inside.

The sun was up and strong enough now to throw a glare that made me squint at the shadows inside. For a moment, I couldn’t make out what Rivers had brought me.

But then I saw movement in the lower bunk at the back.

“Who’s that?” a woman’s soft, shaky, frightened voice asked. “Who’s there?”

In the top bunk, a weaker voice said, “That’s my dad, Mrs. J.”